Compressed sensing: a tool for eliminating repeatability in acquisition of 4D (time-lapse) seismic data

In 4D (time-lapse) seismic data acquisition, a very significant step is the repeatability of the acquisition process. In other words, the geophones must be placed at the exact location as they were, during baseline survey and acquisition. This condition is required to be able to produce an image of the same location over time and this enhances a proper reservoir characterization. The cost of repeating the seismic acquisition is very expensive, as geophones (receivers) have to be left at the same location over the period for which the data will be acquired. In this talk, we attempt to highlight the effort of Compressed Sensing, to eliminate this condition of repeatability of the acquisition. We show that a random sampling of the shots or random placement of the geophones is able to reproduce the same image over time, hence eliminating any acquisition imprints on the final seismic image.